I found I could not
turn away from Jones’s unsparing look at the life and times of Lucy Parsons,
even though I’ve long been familiar with this period of American history.
Parsons was an anarchist agitator who worked and lived across the color line in
gilded-age America. But she was also a reckless if savvy provocateur whose
actions did lasting harm to many. Jones follows Parsons’s life from the slave
south to Reconstruction-era Texas to the industrializing North.
Relentlessly
researched and brilliantly told, the story is at once illuminating and deeply
disturbing.
From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived
Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity…
I found this work to be a complex and nuanced
introduction to the much-debated and poorly understood intellectual revolution
that was the Enlightenment.
Although the book lies outside my own area of
academic expertise, I could easily follow its sweeping narrative as it moved
through both familiar and obscure writers and thinkers. Few subjects escape its
attention, and the volume is particularly strong in exploring the complex
relationship between Enlightenment rationalism and Christianity.
'The best single-volume study of the Enlightenment that we have' Literary Review
The Enlightenment is one of the formative periods of Western history, yet more than 300 years after it began, it remains controversial. It is often seen as the fountainhead of modern values such as human rights, religious toleration, freedom of thought, scientific thought as an exemplary form of reasoning, and rationality and evidence-based argument. Others accuse the Enlightenment of putting forward a scientific rationality which ignores the complexity and variety of human beings, propagates shallow atheism, and aims to subjugate nature to so-called technical progress.
Looking for a break from research, I picked this volume
up at random and found it among the funniest things I’ve ever read. In a series
of self-effacing essays, Hodgman chronicles his challenges and triumphs of
becoming a writer and a family man while moving around New York and New
England.
Offering a mixture of sardonic self-evaluation, whimsy, and understandable
bemusement at the world around him, the book will be a hoot for anyone who’s
ever had to find their way in the world, or down a boat ramp on the coast of
Maine.
“I love everything about this hilarious book except the font size.” —Jon Stewart
Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn’t seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now.
Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of…
Between Freedom and Progress examines the energies unleashed by the ending of the Civil War.
Northerners, especially Republicans, held that victories over slavery and the
Confederacy represented a turning point in world history. Holding the North up
as a model, they argued that the expansion of their own institutions and values
would make the world freer and happier.
White supremacists, including former
Confederates, embittered by the postwar spread of civil rights, prognosticated
that northern Republicans would destroy the world’s greatest republican
experiment by leading it into racial anarchy.
African Americans in the North
and South fought against discrimination, distance, and a dearth of resources to
forge alliances, although a tide of racist violence and economic depression
rolled back their efforts for over a generation.
